The cult of the Last Stand has created what is almost an entire school of English painting. The most famous may be ‘The Last Stand of the survivors of Her Majesty’s 44th Foot at Gandamak’, but there’s plenty of them. Google and see.
This week in Glasgow we’ve begun the first stage of ‘The Last Stand of the Catholic Church in Scotland’, the withdrawal from the perimeter. How they’re to be clustered is being revealed to parishes.
The Last Stand is quite a study, actually, There are even rules of a kind, according to Wikipedia. It is essentially a defensive position. It’s a last resort tactic, and is chosen because the defending force realises the benefits of fighting outweigh the benefits of defeat or surrender. Don’t ask what the benefit of fighting is here. It seems to be a way of showing people who want to provide the Eucharist and the other sacraments that only Tridentine priests are going to get doing that here in Scotland, even if it means no Church eventually. It’s as simple as that. Catholic bishops in Scotland and in England and Wales too of course are in the huff, and they’d rather bring down everything than admit that any validly ordained parishioner can say Mass. By denying this, of course, they’re attacking Canon Law, having hid behind it since 1917.
Now nobody can deny that the Scottish clergy see what they are doing as a Last stand. There has been no attempt even to discuss, least of all with us, the Pope’s frequent offers to listen to his bishops on extended ordination, or to admit that in 2014 he permitted it in the Eastern Church , our fellow Catholics, all over the world. All we’re told is there are no priests. The matter of whose fault that is never seems to come up. Just to make it a good week, as well as STJP2’s romance , yet another old priest is in the papers for historic paedophily. 2+2 =4? Not here. It’s busy, busy, busy ,a preoccupation with clustering, about as big a problem as the average crossword puzzle. This process is described as if it were an abstruse physics problem, although it’s really very straightforward, we would think.
The only ‘enemy ‘we in TSTF can imagine they see is people who want to extend ordination to validly ordained parishioners .
The problem with Last Stands is that they are usually ordered by generals and officers. We obviously have would-be Custers among the Scottish hierarchy. Do they privately wonder who’ll be the last, the Scottish Catholic Episcopal Custer? Although he was a notorious halfwit, who disobeyed orders , causing the death over 200 men, who had little option but to what he said.
Why be a Custer at all ? The psychologists might suggest this desire is yet another problem of celibacy. They want to leave something behind them, but it can’t be a family. So it’s to be a reputation, that of people who were loyal to something to the end, in this case the Tridentine priesthood . As if future generations will feel anything but irritation and embarrassment. To leave behind for future generations of Church historians the label of being a Custer – well, it takes all kinds. This is just Kamikaze Clericalism. And it didn’t work for the kamikazes either.
We almost forgot the cause. You need a really good cause for a Last Stand, surely. And what is it in Scotland? Loyalty to the now defunct Tridentine priesthood? To Cardinal O’Brien? To group solidarity? To the idea that the Tridentine priesthood died to the last man, determined to prevent the Flock from getting the Eucharist unless they got to provide it?
We’ll say more about the famous six years of theological education in due course . But you’ve got to ask yourself if any time was spent on the Last Supper.

Our local broadsheet, ‘The Herald’ reported on January 12 2016 a statement by Archbishop Tartaglia on parish closure . You know the kind of thing . There was a mention of ‘clustering’, although not of the problems which this has caused elsewhere, say in Boston. His remarks displayed a diplomatic approach to the situation, and no exception could be taken to them.
But the final sentence of the article is worthy of careful examination, no mention of which is found elsewhere. We quote it:
‘ The Archdiocese also denied it was attempting to create superparishes and that only in some circumstances would formal amalgamations be an option, while some within the Church have accused the hierarchy of procrastination and seeking to avoid any conflict at all costs.’
Ignore the ‘superparishes’ bit, despite the element of humour which this introduces into a grim subject. Look again at the last clause.‘ ..while some within the Church have accused the hierarchy of procrastination and seeking to avoid any conflict at all costs.’
What we want to know is who are these ‘some’? They obviously resent the diplomacy with which Archbishop Tartaglia has broached the subject in general to an ageing and embattled Catholic population. Possibly, lacking his intellectuality, they simply don’t understand the concept of diplomacy. Surely it cannot be that, should they be clerics, they resent as well an apparent concession to mere layfolk? Dinosaurs, they say, may still survive in the depths of the Congo. But in Glasgow in 2016 ?
Look at the next phrase:‘accused…of seeking to avoid any conflict at all costs’. Now ‘within the Church’ can mean anything. But here we seem to have apparently spiritual(!) descendants of the old top-hatted parish priests, feudal barons in their own parishes, who, if only according to legend, armed with a blackthorn stick and (then) incomprehensible Latin abjurations, would soon knock sense into recalcitrant poor Paddies . Can there really still be lurking in the Archdiocese priests ordained according to the order of Melchisedek, whatever that may actually mean, spoiling for a fight ?
‘At all costs’ What costs? Listening to a flock which has had to cope with Cardinal O’Brien ? Which has had to cope with Currypowdergate in Lanarkshire ? Which has had to cope with an apparently unending succession of paedophile priests ? Which has had to cope with all this in their daily life at work and among neighbours in the bizarre sociological jungle which is life for Catholics in the West of Scotland ?
Who are these ’some within the Church’ mentioned in the article?
We would like to hear from them. If you know who they are, let us know. We would like to reason with them.